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This case follows Enfoca, Peru's largest local private equity firm and its portfolio company Maestro, a leading player in Peru's hardware retail market. Peru's GDP growth between 2008 and 2014 was the highest of any Latin American country. Growth of Peruvian middle class led to a wide array of investment opportunities, particularly in industries such as housing, construction, and home improvement. While the post-recession years were very good for Maestro, due to the market's small size, Enfoca could not escape some of the longstanding specificities of the Peruvian private capital market, namely, limited exit and new investment opportunities. As Enfoca faced an aging fund, its leadership team began considering alternatives to the traditional private equity fund model. This case presents an example of a local private equity firm operating in a small emerging market with relatively low market capitalization. It also evaluates the costs and benefits of the traditional finite-life fund structure and introduces the concept of a secondary transaction as a means to transition fund shares between existing and new limited partners while maintaining the original fund investments.

In 2017, the contract between the Andretti family auto racing business, Andretti Autosport, and Honda Motor Company (Honda) would come to an end following the racing season. Generational family resources and dynamic social media capabilities had created a sustained competitive advantage (SCA) for Andretti Autosport. Also, key strategic decisions surrounding primary engine sponsorship and enterprise diversification afforded the chief executive officer the benefit of financial resources required to fund his Andretti Autosport racing operations across multiple racing platforms. More strategic decisions would have to be made as the contract between Andretti Autosport and Honda was coming to an end. Although the Honda collaboration had been successful, was it the best partnership to sustain the multi-generational organization into the future? What engine sponsor would be the best for Andretti Autosport to partner with for the next racing season?

In early 2017, Voot was one of India's popular video-on-demand (VOD) service providers of movies and television series. By that time, more than 50 million users had installed the application on the Android mobile platform alone. Voot's parent company, Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. (Viacom 18), was popular for its television channels Rishtey, Colors, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central India. Due to a rise in VOD service providers and a growing number of Internet users in India, VOD consumption had been increasing rapidly; therefore, launching Voot was important for Viacom18 to secure a place in the surging digital market. Even though Viacom18 was already a popular television network service provider at the time of Voot's launch, it was not the first service to enter the VOD market, and its competitors were doing well. Voot had to determine what monetization model to implement and it had to choose a content strategy that would allow it to be competitive in the market, considering its diversified consumer base in terms of language, culture, and economic conditions.

Nathalie Parizat and her husband, Hugo, were contemplating a new real estate investment. For two years they had been frustrated by and lamenting their situation of paying high rents to third parties while the couple had idle cash in the bank. They also were convinced that Brooklyn's rising rents and property prices were showing no signs of abating. The couple had $100,000 in savings, which they intended to combine with mortgage financing to purchase a residential income-producing building. Nathalie focused her search on Brooklyn, narrowing it down to Williamsburg, where she thought there was better potential to make a good return on their investment. She had quit her full-time job and was planning on managing the building and the renovation-should it be needed-herself. Was she ready to take on this challenge or was she in over her head?

This case focuses on Hilton's corporate response to the global problem of human trafficking in the hospitality industry. It outlines Hilton's responses to date and discusses the company's human rights policies and forward-looking anti-trafficking initiatives. These include matters such as revising Hilton's internal code of conduct and related policies and procedures, training employees to detect and report trafficking activities, collaborating with anti-trafficking NGOs and civil society organizations, and developing means to enhance scrutiny of partners, vendors, and suppliers. The case ends with the protagonist, Hilton's vice president of corporate responsibility, considering a variety of potential decisions and next steps to implement them.

As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a valuation of $200 million and debating changes to them that will allow them to grow their business. Ensuring that their marketing dollars were being spent efficiently was critical to the data-driven management team and proving to be complicated as the company moved spending from digital marketing to offline media, which made attribution modeling more difficult. Decisions pertaining to product extensions, channel expansion beyond DTC e-commerce, and geographic expansion were also on the table to prove that Hubble's customer value proposition and operations could profitably scale.

Xbed Technology Group (Xbed), a start-up that branded itself as an online hotel platform, was founded in 2015 with the aim of addressing the changing landscape of China's hospitality industry while coping with issues related to a customer-to-customer sharing economy model. By employing a dual-sharing model and utilizing state-of-the-art digital technologies, the company emerged as a disruptor in the market and expanded to 44 cities in China in just two years of development. As Xbed grew, it faced many challenges, including intense competition from both sharing economy players and traditional hotels. In 2017, as the company looked toward the future, its founder wondered about the future of hospitality services in China and what the company's strategic focus should be as it pursued its next phase of growth.

On April 21, 2014 two companies, Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Pershing Square, announced an unsolicited merger offer for Allergan Pharmaceuticals. The unsolicited offer quickly turned into a hostile acquisition. The following months saw a raging public debate over the future control of Allergan and its primary product, Botox, as well as the business strategies and philosophies of the two offering firms and their CEOs.

The case describes how Bayer, one of the oldest and largest life-science companies in the world, recognised that innovation driven solely by the traditional R&D process that characterised the sector would not be sufficient to remain competitive, given the major changes underway in pharma and crop science and the broader trends in digital disruption. This recognition came from the very top, CEO Marijn Dekkers, who took the decision in 2015 to instigate a major corporate restructuring: Bayer would focus on its core life-science businesses (pharmaceuticals, consumer health and crop science) and spin off its material science business as a completely separate company. Beginning in 2016 under Board member Kemal Malik, Bayer began to put an innovation strategy in place that deliberately sought a systemic approach, meaning company-wide, to make innovation the responsibility of all Bayer employees. The question then arose how to put this vision into effect. How could Bayer promote greater innovation throughout the company, given that it had more than 100,000 employees spread over 75 countries? What actual initiatives could be undertaken to make innovation more effective and impactful? The case details how Monika Lessl, who reported directly to Malik, put in place a cross-divisional and cross-functional team to identify the most important areas to tackle and how, by 2018, the innovation programme she oversaw had "real momentum", with more than 1,000 people having some sort of formal role in support of innovation, more than 5,000 involved in innovation training, and more than 35,000 connected through the company's innovation portal.

The case describes how Mike Bracken, the newly appointed head of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), took on the massive challenge of setting up, from scratch, a centralised team to deliver online public services efficiently online across all of the government's digital channels. This involved not merely overcoming great operational and technical challenges - legacy IT systems, lack of recognition and reward for specialist skills - but instigating deep cultural change and securing senior-level buy-in to make the necessary changes happen. The case illustrates how to approach implementing large-scale change across a highly bureaucratic organisation; in this case, the UK government. As such, it is a beautiful illustration of where agile works well. One key point to note is that, rather than focusing on the specifics of agile working, it demonstrates when agile methods can be a very powerful tool for enabling change. It also illustrates the importance of a decisive leader in getting an agile way of working implemented (and to some extent, risk-taking on the part of Mike Bracken and his sponsor in government). We will discuss the pros and cons of this approach.

John Law had fled to safety in Brussels, Belgium, in December 1720. His furtive exit from France confirmed for many people that he was a criminal. Yet only months before, he had been hailed as a financial genius and the second most powerful person in France. In four years, he had managed to refinance the nearly bankrupt government of France and in the process created new markets, institutions, and securities. Then a bubble and crash in France's markets turned public opinion against him. In advance of petitioning for a return to Paris, Law needed to prepare a defense. To sustain a return, he would need to assert that the collapse of the Mississippi Company bubble was a matter of external circumstances and bad luck rather than mismanagement or fraud. On what circumstances could he pin the rehabilitation of his reputation?

In September 2009, President Barack Obama announced a hefty tariff on low-cost automobile and light truck tires imported from China. Earlier that year, the United Steelworkers of America, which represented workers in many US tire production plants, had filed for protection under Section 421 (the "China safeguard") of the US Trade Act of 1974. Supporters of the decision saw the tariff on Chinese tires as an extension of the president's efforts to enhance the enforcement of trade laws, the position Obama had adopted time and again as a candidate in 2007. Could the tire safeguard provide a template for how policymakers could protect American workers?

Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore) Limited (Standard Chartered) was part of an international banking group that focused on the creation of wealth across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As part of its commitment to corporate social responsibility, Standard Chartered launched a project in 2012 called Silver Lining, a community project that aimed to support elderly Singaporeans in meeting their financial and health care needs. Silver Lining had overcome a number of challenges since its inception, choosing appropriate partners and finding ways to help young volunteers overcome language barriers to work with elderly clients. It had also joined with other organizations to collaborate on offering supports and services to seniors in the community, some of whom were dealing with poor mental health. In early 2017, Standard Chartered had to make some key strategic decisions in order to ensure the continued relevance of Silver Lining and justify the need for continued funding for the project.

The president and vice-president of BonaVista Pools Limited (BonaVista) needed to decide what to do for the upcoming pool production season. They received notice that the two employees in charge of overseeing the most crucial step of the pool production process were going to be unavailable for the upcoming period. Anticipating a busy season, the president and vice-president needed to decide whether to hire a new nozzle operator, promote their junior nozzle operator, or outsource this crucial step in the pool production process. They needed to look at the financial and operational implications of each option and ensure they maintained the premier standard of BonaVista set by their father.

Tonya Lanthier tucked her twin 13-year-old girls Teagan and Ramsey into bed and gave each of them a big hug. She considered herself blessed to have two happy children and a fast-growing business that enabled dentists to find well-matched auxiliary staff, and for dentists, dental assistants, hygienists and front-office staff to find jobs they loved. Her company, DentalPost, was by all accounts thriving. Earlier in the week, however, she'd attended a workshop on product and service innovation and a couple of her fellow participants had suggested ways that what they had learned could be put to use in Tonya's business. "We've got the most comprehensive solution in our industry," she thought to herself, "and we've been making it even better - one step at a time - for more than a decade. There's always been an opportunity for us to innovate and that's probably still true, even now. So, I wonder what our next innovation should be?"

This is a two-part case. Case A introduces Kim Underhill as the new Regional Head at Appliances International, a leading global appliances manufacturer that has sold more than 30 million household and professional products in over 70 markets. Underhill was headhunted in December 2016 to help revive the firm's declining performance in the key Asia-Pacific markets of India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Of the four markets, India, had proved to be particularly challenging with AI having a marginal presence, stagnant sales, recurring losses, and poor brand image in the country. Upon taking charge, Underhill sensed some wariness on the part of the India team in dealing with a woman leader. She held meetings with the employees to understand the issues better, and thereafter decided to implement a series of measures to help turn the situation around. Over the next few months, she laid off a number of senior managers whom she believed were incompetent and lacked motivation. She implemented new performance incentives for the sales staff. She also met the key customers, and worked towards addressing their concerns and misgivings with AI. However, by the end of the year, there was no significant improvement in AI India's sales performance or relationships with its channel partners. With 14 months gone by, Underhill was worried. Had she overcommitted by promising to turnaround the company in two years? What should she do now? Case B sees Underhill implementing other initiatives to turn the company around, such as joint activities with channel partners, investment in brand activities, running of product and service training, and holding regional meetings to encourage open conversations among colleagues across different offices. She also drew upon AI's matrix structure to have experienced managers located in other countries assist in coaching employees at the India office. Consequently, AI's sales in India began to grow, recording 20% increase in the following year.